The Ken Masters Interview
by JoeAverageSF
Summary: Black Belt magazine interviews the legendary martial artist Ken Masters on his participation in the Street Fighter tournament. Get all the behindthescenes information here!


**RYU**

Here' s a little known fact about Ryu: Whenever he fights Chun-Li, he always hits her a little bit harder than anyone else.

True story: We both made it to the second-tier of the 1994 tournament, I just kicked the crap out of that stupid Russian, and I decided, what the hell, I'm gonna go support my buddy.

Did I fly all the way to China for the fight? No. The documentarians and the video game people want you all to believe that we all fly around the world on a weekly basis, kicking the crap out of each other. We don't. It's expensive. They have set designers that'll do up any kind of environment you want, and since the first round of fighting takes place in eastern Europe, they have all these master craftsmen they don't pay shit.I could tell you all the other ways the movies and the games get it wrong, but it would break your heart.

Go figure.

Anyway.

In the game, Chun-Li fights on a street in China, surrounded by her friends and family. They did fly her folks up from China, but the street itself is some rinky dink market area in Bucharest. I caught the fight mid-way through, after ordering a grasa from the street vendor nearby. It was one of the most vicious things I'd ever seen.

Make no mistake, Chun-Li gave a hell of an account of herself. I used to believe this was a man's sport, y'know, but she really spun my head on that especially after the Venice semi-finals where she popped two of my ribs out of place. But she really got taken down a peg by Ryu.

It's not like he's Sagat. He won't just tear your head off out of spite, grind you into the ground when you're down. He just made her feel...I dunno...powerless. Every thing he did to her, he did with cold-hearted deliberation. He countered every move she tried and added a little bit more pop! to his moves than he usually does. I'm sure the cameras didn't catch that, but I trained with him. I know the guy. I could see it. So could she. You'd think she just dumped him or something.  
I think he wanted her to see him as powerful but mysterious warrior, or something. When she threw in the tower and she was laying broken on the ground, y'know what he said to her?

"Try harder."

Then he just picked up his stupid homeless bindle and walked away. I called after him and I KNOW that he heard me, but he just kept walking.

How's that for some cold shit?

Anyway, Chun-Li was hanging out with her family (Bison hadn't shown up in the picture yet and her father was still alive) and she was completely devistated. She was just out of her teens, she made it to the finals, and she just got completely served. I think she expected to carry it all the way, and to have been so coldly outclassed really hit her hard. I can't say I didn't feel sorry for her, but them's the breaks. I took her out to dinner later, but nothing really came of it.

Anyway, she never was all that comfortable around Ryu after that. In fact, I'm pretty sure she made it a point to take him down in the future. Before the whole Shadowloo thing kicked up, they had a fierce rivalry going on and I think she swung the win/loss ratio to nearly sixty-forty. It used to drive her nuts when the magazines speculated that the rivalry had a romantic element.

"Keen" she'd say because her Engrish wasn't so goord "I rearry hate that bastard! Wha's his probrem wif me?"

Tell you the truth, I think Ryu is the way he is because he doesn't know how to talk to girls.  
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He has always been like that, just waaaaay too wrapped up in his head.

I remember this one night when we were in our teens. Ryu was happy to spend all that time in sensei's cabin. Sensei thought it showed diligence, but I think that it had more to do with the fact that he was always uncomfortable around kids his own age. Myself, as much as I loved training, I was living in Japan. The bubble hadn't burst and there was always another club full of kids wasting money or streets full of Yakuza to beat up, or girls who would fall in love with an athletic jing gai who spoke perfect Japanese.

So we're at Cloud, one of those neon-pissy little dance clubs in Shinjuku and I'm chatting up a couple of honeys for about a half hour. Ryu was standing over my shoulder, not saying anything, but I'm getting this really intense vibe off him. I try to bring him into the conversation:

"And this is my friend. Hey Ryu, why don't you introduce yourself?"

The girls giggle. He's a handsome dude and he's got that stoic thing going on that chicks dig. Then he opens his big crazy mouth.

"The warrior's path is a lonely one."

And he turns and walks away.

Friggin' awkward. And you know what? I bet he was waiting all night to say it.  
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To paraphrase Kevin Smith: "Ryu has lived in RyuLand for a long time."

Tell you something else about him: He really does wear that stupid gi all the time.

See that guy at church wearing the karate outfit? Ryu.

See that guy in the gi at your sister's wedding? Ryu.

See that guy waiting in line at the bank? Ryu.

He doesn't need to. Motherfucker's a millionaire by now. He just socks away his money, then runs around, acting homeless and staying in fleabag hotels the world over.  
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Do you know who Ryu reminds me of? Dwight Schrute.

You know who I'm talking about? The tightly wound authority-freak from The Office, right? That's Ryu to a tee, except Ryu can shoot fireballs from his hands.

Sometimes I feel bad for him. The rest of the street fighters moved on. We fought our battles, killed our demons, found whatever it was we were looking for (to various degrees) and rejoined the world. He's the only one that's still out there.

If you were to ask me, I think Ryu is a very lonely dude. He's very unhappy and he doesn't know how to talk to people so he has this big scary persona to help keep the people around him on his terms. Seriously, who would spend their entire life just wandering around looking for someone to hit?

**DHALSIM**

Dhalsim was the real deal.

I had a hard time with that, y'know. I was twenty-three and didn't know shit from shinola and here's this twiggly little Indian guy in his sixties doing stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend.

The most common question that I get from fans is about the ha-do-ken and the sho-ryu-ken. Being able to do that, people think you're some kind of wizard or superhero. You're not. It's just a trick. It's a trick that takes a lot of practice, but all it amounts to is channelling a part of yourself most people don't even realize they have.

So I get how I work. I don't get how Dhalsim works. His stuff feels different. Very different. Truthfully, I've always been a bit frightened of him.

You know those skulls Dhalsim has on? They were put on by the props department. He really can stretch himself like that and it's pretty freaky to watch, so they wanted to jazz him up and make him scarier. One prop guy in particular is really sprung on the idea and runs to the tournament hosts to push it. Dhalsim objects to them at first, specifically the notion that they're children's skulls, but they have some leverage over him and he caves in.

That same prop guy is doing the Teletubbies now and Dhalsim has turned out to be one of the great spiritual leaders of the new millenium.

Which is the other thing. I don't understand why a guy like that is fighting in the Street Fighter tournament. That yogi thing is not an act. He really believes in it. I just assumed that going around, kicking people's asses would be blashphemy or something.

I asked him about it once and he said, in perfectly unaccented English, because his flock missed the point the first time around.

Go figure.

**BLANKA**

Blanka.

Right.

The tournaments really started going down hill when that...thing showed up.

I read the bio. Plane crash in Brazil, raised by animals, learned to channel the body's electrical field from eels, blah blah blah. Bullshit. Somebody made him, and they didn't make him to be friendly.

I fought the guy six times, and half those times I was convinced that they dyed a baboon and really pissed it off. I continued to believe that until I threw him into a stone wall in Prague and he called me a cocksucker.

When you were in the ring with Blanka, you were fighting for your life. He did use his claws and he did bite with those big ass teeth and, if he felt so inclined, he would hit you with that defribbilator skin of his. He was not actually a very good fighter, but it was hard not to panic when he's coming at you. That's what happened to Guile in Rio De Janero. Whenever he wants to get chicks, he shows him the scar on his forehead from that claw slash in round two.

Anyway, I have no idea where Blanka is now, nor do I care to. For all I know, he's back in the jungle, bothering other critters and screwing around with the ecosystem. But I'll tell ya this: Blanka had handlers. Serious looking guys with military crew cuts. They'd watch the fights, take notes and film, then tranq his ass up and stick him in a box.

God knows what kind of damage Blanka could do in the right hands.

**GUILE**

Colonel Guile is the one fighter popular culture has gotten the most wrong.

No, he was not in Special Forces. No, he wasn't a spymaster or a man who had the ears of generals. Yes, he flew fighter planes. No, he didn't have an eight-foot tall flat top. He was in the military for God's sake. That kind of lunatic detail could have only been thought up by the Japanese.

He could wing that sonic boom, though. I never quite figured out how. It comes from a different place than the sho-ryu-ken. Getting hit with it was like getting hit by a pure sound. Try standing next to the speakers next time you're at a rock concert. Then turn it up past eleven.

He rolled with the tournament to the end and he still trains fighters to this day. He really loved the whole thing. I don't know too much about him, but I gathered that his interest in the tournament really pissed off his superiors. He wanted to go higher in his career, but they cut him off after the third go-around. "Not enough focus" they used to tell him.

Fighting him was always an interesting challenge. Out of all the competitors, he was the most patient. His tricks didn't fare so well if he rushed in like the rest of us. He hung back, let someone else make the first move, then WHAM sonic kick.

What's he like? Watch the reality-TV show. He's not acting, that's him to a tee. He's an intense, disciplined dude. Possibly too much so. He was a great opponent, but he's not someone to get drunk with later.

**ZANGIEFF**

First off, and I'm being honest here, most of us wrote Zangieff off as a comedy act. Yeah, if he hit you, you would have a helluva time remembering your name, but he was slow as molasses and couldn't stack up to anyone who could hit hard or throw fireballs. His win/loss rating was the worst in the tournaments and the only time he droppeed me was because he got me drunk the night before.

That was one thing he could do: party. I'm almost convinced that he didn't enter the tournaments for the fighting, but for the celebration afterwards. The guy was gregarious as all hell. I remember one evening in Kawaii. Earlier that day he beat the living snot out of Dan, stomped him so deep into the ground I thought they were gonna need construction tools to get him out. Personally, I can't deal with that kind of loss comfortably, but that night both he and Dan were drinking and laughing and picking up groupies at the local bar.

That's just the kind of guy he was. I could only take him in small doses, but when I was in the right mood he was a lot of fun to be around.

Little secret about Zangieff: half the time I wondered if the whole "dumb Russian galoot" thing was an act. Every now and again he'd catch me at a bar or a restaurant or something and we'd spend hours discussing politics or literature or whatever, and it turned out that he was always better-read, more articulate, and more insightful.

So he was a very intelligent, very well-educated man. Who fought bears.

**HONDA**

Honda. Wow. I haven't thought about him in years.

I kinda promised myself I wouldn't talk about what happened in Beijing. Fei Long felt terrible about it, and it's pretty clear that incident caused him to retire from Street Fighting. Shame. He was an incredible fighter with a long career ahead of him. Besides, someone should set the record straight.

People look at the tapes of Honda's later bouts and they wonder why a guy in such obvious poor condition was allowed to reenter the ring over and over again. They tend to hold us, the fighters, culpable for Honda's death.We tried to warn him. We said that the whole Street Fighting thing is much more strenuous than sumo, but he just ignored us. As unpleasant as he was to be around, the gigantic chip on his shoulder didn't help matters much. He felt he had something to prove, and that's what killed him in the end.

Besides, this was right after the whole Shadowloo thing. The fights had become more private, more secretive. The advertisement types got sqeamish about spending money in a tournament hosted by a known tyrant and after Sagat beat Thunder Hawk to death, the whole thing became deadly serious. Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure the climate change appealed more to Honda more than anyone else.

"Finally," he said to me during the Thailand semi-finals "this is a tournament of warriors."

And that's how he saw himself. Yeah, he worked hard and killed himself at the gym, but he had the wrong mentality, the wrong tools, and he didn't know how to change.

In the end, he was Chris Farley, only not funny at all.

**CHUN-LI**

Chun-Li...

(interviewer's note-at this point in the coversation, Mr. Masters paused for several moments. We both stared at the waters of the French Riviera for awhile before we continued)

Chun-Li was the smartest among us. She got out.

I used to have some, well, preconcieved notions of the women who would enter these tournaments. Honestly, I thought most of them were either dykes or crazy as a shithouse rat. Cammy proved the latter to be true, but Chun-Li didn't fit into either catagory. Initially, before the whole Shadowloo thing went down, she was like Ryu. She loved the study of martial arts and she wanted to prove to herself that she learned something. Unlike Ryu, she didn't get so wrapped up in herself that she couldn't see the world around her.

Then Bison wrecked her life.

Chun-Li was a Daddy's girl through and through. I actually met they guy once. He had this big, open, Chow Yun-Fat smile and he was a very warm guy. Her mother died when she was young and they were pretty much inseperable since. Whenever he got some leave, he used to come out there and watch her fight, and afterward they'd go out to dinner somewhere.

You all know the rest at this point. Bison had Chun-Li's father killed for investigating the guns-for-opium link between Shadowloo and the PRC. What's not very well remembered is the fact that Chun-Li's father was tortured to death and filmed the whole thing.

And that was the worst for her. Suddenly her father's death was international news, like Daniel Pearl or that Russian soldier. People would download footage of it on Ogrish or where ever. She was bombarded with questions at the gym, outside her fights, anywhere she went. The girl couldn't get a minute to grieve...

(Mr. Masters stares silently out into the ocean)

I don't blame her for what she did in Thailand. Let the movies and the books and the manga say that Ryu fought Bison to the death. Let them paint him as a mastermind or a warrior or a dark magic prince. He was just another evil-hearted bastard in a world of evil hearted bastards, and the world is greater for his passing. But I was watching her face when she crushed his throat.

Even getting payback didn't help her. I think it did more harm than good, actually. It took Chun-Li to a very dark place. She was a very unhappy person. She lost the love of the contest. It was good for her to leave when she did, otherwise the cruelty would have eaten her up inside.

I see her every once in awhile, when I'm in her neck of the woods. She still has the scars from her fight, when that son of a bitch burned himself into her body. She's still beautiful and time hasn't taken the light from her eyes. I won't say anything more of her than that. She wants her privacy and I respect that.

The road not taken...

(Mr. Masters becomes silent)

**BALROG**

Back in the day, none of us could figure out how a boxer made it to the semi-finals.

Come on. He only uses his hands, he's made his career in the rule-heavy boxing world, and to top it all off he's a disgrace at that. We might as well just be passed on to the second round.

The first time I fought him, it took him 49 seconds to demolish me.

Say what you will about his conduct before and after the tournament. Say what you will about his lengthy legal issues with his management firm. Say what you will about that civil suit with the Bellagio. The man can fight.

Little secret about boxers: They know that the fight game isn't about fancy moves and ancient Japanese mystic hoo-doo. The fight game is about conditioning. You need to be strong enough to hand out pain, hearty enough to take it, and confident enough not to get rattled. He had all that in spades and he probably would have gone higher had the deck not been so purposefully stacked against him.

**VEGA**

In pop culture, Vega tends to get portrayed as a fine-skinned lothario dandy. At this point, not much could be farther from the truth. Get hit in the face with thirty pounds of pressure for 10 years and see how much good a metal mask does. He is still an egotistical son of a bitch, but since he has a different girl in his bed every night I suppose he has a right to be.

Again, pop culture gets it wrong. Vega is not in the employ of Shadowloo and he doesn't spend his time bringing beautiful death to unlucky mooks around the world. Vega is basically a vain sensualist. When he's in public it's all silk and Egyptian cotton. When he's in private it's Spanish models and their Italian daughters.

The real irony is if you scratch very deep under the surface you will find a semi-decent guy. Vega has been known to be a semi-decent human being. He anonymously donates more money to charities than the rest of us, he's very close to his family (especially his much cuckloid ex-wife) and he's actually a really fun guy to spend an evening at the bar with. He's basically Puss in Boots from Shrek.

Having said that all, he's not a hard guy to beat in a fight. All he has is speed and once you figure your way around that, it's over for him.

**SAGAT**

If there ever was a man who could be described as an engine of hate, it was Sagat.

He's one of the most dangerous men you can meet in the ring. In a profession where the average fighter retires at twenty-six and is dead by forty, Sagat is still fighting at pushing fifty. He does it by engaging in the most punishing work-out I've ever seen a man subject himself to. I often wonder if one day he'll be on his well-deserved deathbed and he'll look back and see the endless wasted years that stretch behind him before he sinks into the long dark.

It's kind of funny that he pushes himself like that, because he's a man without hope.

The man became fixated on Ryu. That scar on his chest is all the more hideous up close, and I really doubt it will ever heal internally or externally. He made the rematch become his whole purpose for being, only to be taken out in the last thirty seconds or so. I watched the tape obsessively once and in truth I don't think Ryu won a second time because he was better. Ryu just had a lucky day.

So Sagat goes back to the jungle. He left the world, goes back to training obsessively, and something really nasty grew inside of him. We all watched him advance in the 1999 tournament and he was...well, he was always a scary dude, but something dark lived in him.

Then came the fight with Thunder Hawk.

Look, deaths do happen. This is a full-contact tournament with some of the biggest, baddest, meanest people in the world. But stomping on a man's back while he's down and obviously out is cold-blooded murder.

They stripped him of everything. Every tournament he ever one, any tournament he will ever be in, all of it gone. They even polished his name off the big golden trophy at the main office. All those years, all that work, all that hate. Gone in one go.

Whatever. After what he did in Thailand, he deserves to moulder in obscurity. Forgotten. Alone.

**BISON**

I've said my peace on Bison and that evil land he called home. We all have.

Suffice to say, he was a blight on the world and it's a very good thing that he's gone.

I just wish someone didn't have to give up so much to end him.

**KEN**

Me?

Well, I loved it. The good times, the long dark times, the whole shebangabang. Say what you will about the tournament, about the deaths, about humanity's endless love for spectacle, the most vivid times of my life were those days.

People called us whores for participating during the Shadowloo-hosted. Some times I can't say I blame them. What did it say about us when we were willing to shake hands with the devil to get one more match? That's the only question that keeps me up at night.

My life is good. I made a tremendous amount of money during the whole thing and I use it to travel this big stupid globe. I've been to each corner of the world and I've seen a million amazing sights. I've fallen in and out of love. I've been a father and I've buried my son. I visited Thunder Hawk's family and we shared our grief and became clean. Every once in awhile I'll wander back to California and do a direct-to-DVD movie.

I even reconnected with my old friend. He's still out in RyuLand, and he's getting a little too old for this shit, but we sparred by moonlight in the darkest forst of Germany while wolves howled around us. That was pretty cool.

I've done a lot of things in my life, but I can't say I'm any more wise or mature than when I started out. People can go to the farthest reaches of the world, then come back and be the same ignorant assholes they were when they left. I still make a lot of the wrong decisions and stumble over my feet because I'm only human and I carry myself where ever I go.

Lately I've been thinking of settling down and teaching what I know. Sensei always expected Ryu to take up his position, but it's pretty clear to me that Ryu will never stop. I will find some bright, capable young man or woman and I will sit them down and I will say this:

"If you choose to learn what I have to teach, it will become your whole life. Everything you do, everything you have, will be tied into the path of the warrior. It's like being married to an impatient lover. It will not always be kind. It will break your body and your soul, but the rewards are vast. You will see the world with open eyes. And you won't be afraid."

I'll teach them. Maybe they'll listen.

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This interview was recorded in Black Belt Magazine, July 10th 2007 in Nice, France

Ryu could not be reached for comment.

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